It's the semi-annual file synchronization crisis, brought to you by Adobe and Daylight Savings Time, now in its nth year!

My entire 4000+ page site has gone out of synch with my local files due to daylight savings time. Apart from spending hours uploading the entire site, what can I do to maintain proper synchronization? I'd love to see an official tech note addressing this issue. BTW, I do not have any authority over the server to which I post files, so I can't make changes to how the server's timestamps are administered.

This is one you'll have to live with unless you're willing to move to part of the country that doesn't bother with daylights savings time. It's been a bug for at least 10 years (I've been using different versions of Dreamweaver since 2000 with many different hosts and servers). I suspect no one at Adobe actually uses Dreamweaver or it might have been fixed by now.

I reserve a few days to resync all my sites and files after daylight savings time changes - a major pain. now that I have close to 100,000 files to deal with.

Most good FTP programs deal with it by having a sync option to ignore file dates that are exactly 1 hour off. Some users suggest changing the server time, but I highly recommend against this, even if you have full server access.

Well, thanks for the reply, although it was about what I'd expected. I've been living with this problem for about that long as well, but thought I'd check in to see if anyone had ever done anything about it.

I think I read somewhere that the major aspect of the issue is the way Windows handles daylight savings time. From what I understand, Windows' automatic adjustment for DST doesn't really adjust your clock -- it only pretends to. My workaround is to turn off automatic DST adjustment in Windows and set my clock manually twice a year. Which works out fine for file synching, but screws up my Outlook calendar: if you create a calendar item to share with others, the time will be off by 1 hour.

Note: I'm running XP SP3 and Outlook 2003, so the above may not be true when using more up-to-date Microsoft products.

It's an issue with all Windows. I'm now using Windows 7 SP1, x64, so upgrading Windows will not fix it.

You're also right about the file times. With Windows NT-Win7 the file date/time is actually saved as UTC time, but 'adjusted' to your local time and is one of the reasons it happens. Still doesn't excuse Adobe for not making a fix for something so annoying and easily corrected. FTP software and Microsoft Expressions handle it fine. Microsoft Expressions is a Dreamweaver competitor, and I use it for one small site.

If there was a good, easy to learn alternative to Dreamweaver, I would switch in an instance *just* for this DST issue alone! I'm sick of having to deal with this twice a year. I've got about 15 client web sites, each with thousands (and some with *tens* of thousands) of files. I maintain the sites on two computers, so I'm likely having to deal with this bi-annual synchronization problem on hundreds of thousands of files. Simply running a "synchronize" on a single site's full file set can take several hours just to produce the list, then another hour or two to actually do the synchronization. Something is *very* wrong with this picture! I've been using Dreamweaver for years, and it's unfortunately really showing its age. Despite (very costly) upgrades, which are more eye candy than true innovative functionality, silly stuff like this DST issue remain. And worse than that is that Adobe seems to be silent on the matter. I've seen posts / complaints about it for at least two years, but have yet to see any response from Adobe.

I've no solution, but just wanted to post to share your frustration. This has been a problem with Dreamweaver for years, and is frankly a major PITA. You'd think such an expensive product worked on by so many coders would have squashed this bug ages ago, but no, plainly the coders can't write simple code which would detect when Daylight Saving kicks in and offer you the option to 'fix' the synch such that files whose timestamps are exactly an hour behind/ahead would be marked as synched. It's not as if it's a tough algorithm, after all. Sadly, DW has become baroque bloatware since being taken over by the Adobe corporate behemoth, which seems intent on building in pointless features so as to generate sales from those eager to keep up with the latest version. I use it because my employer's bought it, but there's no way on this green earth I'd shell out for such a poor product if I had to pay out of my own pocket.

Just my 2 cent's worth...

Fred

PS: Oh, and here's an 'issue' for the board admins. Hitting reply in Firefox 4 doesn't generate this HTML editor, but instead everything just hangs. I've had to go into Safari to reply. No big, it just adds a few mm to the blood pressure and makes the poster even more cross.

"I think I read somewhere that the major aspect of the issue is the way Windows handles daylight savings time. From what I understand, Windows' automatic adjustment for DST doesn't really adjust your clock -- it only pretends to."

It's not a Windoze-only thing - I get the same DST problem using DW for OS/X. It's a DW problem.

I would say it is the problem of a host being in a different timezone. If you are in the UK and your host is somewhere in the USA then you are likely to see this problem because people in the USA may not be in sync with people in the UK but this is a temporary problem.

The solution is to avoid sync within a period of 24 hours after the time change.

"I would say it is the problem of a host being in a different timezone. If you are in the UK and your host is somewhere in the USA then you are likely to see this problem because people in the USA may not be in sync with people in the UK but this is a temporary problem."

I'm in the UK, and the hosts I use are in the UK. I repeat: this is a Dreamweaver problem, and one that's existed for many years now. Adobe should sort it out, seeing as DW is supposed to be a "premium project" (cough!).

And we're here again. I'll spend at least half my day with this sync issue, plus I'll leave it syncing file once I go home. This bug is one of the reasons we'll eventually leave Dreamweaver behind. Also, the stess of syncing thousands of files always crashes dreamweaver.

Not being able to remember open documents after this or other crashes is another of the reasons why my coworkers lobby to move from dreamweaver.

Just logged an error report on this. I've been with Dreamweaver for a long time and I am sure this is a dreamweaver problem but I am also thinking its a Mac problem as I have a collegue using the same server and he doe not have a problem although he is on an ancient version of Dreamweaver.I have also noticed that if you look at the a file that is out of sync with Filezilla it looks OK but when I pull it up on Dreamweaver it is an hour ahead on the server. (currently in BST) I know that my server is in the UK and I also know that my server is set to use BST automatically. If I sync the file with Dreamweaver then it becomes an hour out in Filezilla